Page 179 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 179
memory and identity in film
it is much more present in our heads as an external memory of many im-
ages. This is not true only for the part of history, which was happening in
front of the eye of a camera, but older history too, since it was reconstruct-
ed and re-imagined in many proper and improper ways in hundreds of fea-
ture films. 5
But let us get back to the previous line of thinking. Rachel Moore in
her book follows Eisenstein on his way to shooting in Mexico. As Eisen-
stein stopped in Paris, she reports that he read Lévy-Bruhl‘s book How
Natives Think (L’âme primitive), where, as we are told, he found other ev-
idence of the “prelogic”. Therefore, I can conclude this following of the Ra-
chel Moore’s presentation by remembering Eisenstein’s unfinished job on
his ¡Que Viva Mexico! and by realising that, this project was one of anthro-
pological or ethnographic movies, which was shot on the ground of the au-
thor’s theoretical reflection that in turn had sprung from his practice as the
film director.
5 Geoffrey Nowell-Smyth (1990: 161/162) discovered that one of the first war docu-
mentaries in film history, which depicted the American war against Spain in 1898,
had been actually a reconstruction. War ships, for instance, were just models float-
ing in a bathtub. So, very early in cinema history a fragment of film news, which be-
came later a part of collective memory, demonstrated that shooting a film is always a
construction of reality, no matter how we pretend and try to diminish a distance be-
tween representation and the represented.
177
it is much more present in our heads as an external memory of many im-
ages. This is not true only for the part of history, which was happening in
front of the eye of a camera, but older history too, since it was reconstruct-
ed and re-imagined in many proper and improper ways in hundreds of fea-
ture films. 5
But let us get back to the previous line of thinking. Rachel Moore in
her book follows Eisenstein on his way to shooting in Mexico. As Eisen-
stein stopped in Paris, she reports that he read Lévy-Bruhl‘s book How
Natives Think (L’âme primitive), where, as we are told, he found other ev-
idence of the “prelogic”. Therefore, I can conclude this following of the Ra-
chel Moore’s presentation by remembering Eisenstein’s unfinished job on
his ¡Que Viva Mexico! and by realising that, this project was one of anthro-
pological or ethnographic movies, which was shot on the ground of the au-
thor’s theoretical reflection that in turn had sprung from his practice as the
film director.
5 Geoffrey Nowell-Smyth (1990: 161/162) discovered that one of the first war docu-
mentaries in film history, which depicted the American war against Spain in 1898,
had been actually a reconstruction. War ships, for instance, were just models float-
ing in a bathtub. So, very early in cinema history a fragment of film news, which be-
came later a part of collective memory, demonstrated that shooting a film is always a
construction of reality, no matter how we pretend and try to diminish a distance be-
tween representation and the represented.
177
